For a time in the 1990s, a film adaptation of a John Grisham novel was guaranteed to turn a tidy profit at the box office, if not mushroom into a full-on blockbuster.
“The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client” all made loads of money off of a built-in audience that just had to see how the lawyer-turned-bestselling author’s latest book was brought to life by Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Tommy Lee Jones, and Susan Sarandon, among many others, were enlisted to turn these page-turners into big-screen spectacles.
They were never better than over-produced B movies, but you didn’t care because the material was never more than risible.
Grisham wrote disposable legal thrillers that moved fast enough to get you past their myriad implausibilities, and there was nothing wrong with this.”A Time to Kill” was a different animal.
Based on Grisham’s debut novel,…
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